The new film of Les Misérables is the one fans of the muscial have been
waiting for, writes Serena Davies, who saw the original production
when she was 11

I first saw the musical of Les Misérables on my 11th birthday, in September 1985. It was the original RSC production, then still in preview at the Barbican; the infamously bad reviews that would greet it were yet to come out. I was knocked out by it. I thought that this show full of anthems about poverty and revolt in 19th-century France – and which finally, 27 years later, has been adapted into a film version – was the most moving thing I’d ever seen.

It is hard to overstress how seductive Victor Hugo’s brilliantly devised combination of heroism and abject misery was to a mind on the brink of adolescence. Everyone, not just the prostitute Fantine, who sings its most famous song, is dreaming dreams in Les Misérables, and they all, from the pickpocket Gavroche to the policeman Javert, are willing to die for them – and usually do. That birthday treat became, without doubt, the defining cultural influence on my 11-year-old, and indeed 12-year-old, self.

I bought the record. I listened to composer Claude-Michel Schönberg’s heart-rending tunes so often the record sleeves with the lyrics written on them fell apart. But that was OK because, by then, I knew them off by heart. All seven verses of On My Own refuse to leave my head to this day. In fact, I can still manage most of side three.

I read the book, in English admittedly, and discovered, a bit like Anna Karenina, that there’s an awful lot of disquisition on social justice that adaptations do well to leave out. My favourite character, Éponine, the musical’s most exemplary exponent of unrequited love, faded right back into the panoply of the great unwashed in Hugo’s original, which was a disappointment. Her death got only a paragraph; although it was a good one. “She tried to smile and died,” he wrote.

Back at Les Misérables HQ – in events that I was oblivious to at the time – the seeming kiss of death from the critics had been countered by the reviving breath of remarkable ticket sales. Much to producer Cameron Mackintosh’s amazement, a transfer of Trevor Nunn’s production to the West End was assured. And the rest – as the PR machine behind the worldwide phenomenon that this show has become likes to point out – is history.

Les Misérables is the world’s longest-running musical; it has been put on in 300 different cities and translated into 21 languages. An estimated 60 million people have now seen hero Jean Valjean break parole and find his life transformed through his fatherly love for the daughter of a whore, a storyline which is set against a backdrop of popular unrest that culminates in the failed Paris uprising of 1832.

I’ve not forgotten the show over the years. It still gives me particular pleasure that Michael Ball (the first Marius) and Roger Allam (the original Javert) have gone on to have such illustrious careers, and particular sadness thatFrances Ruffelle (the first Éponine, at 19 years old) didn’t become the star she should have been.

The last (and third) time I saw the musical on the stage was five years ago, and two of the musicians in the pit were clearly reading books when it wasn’t their turn to play. I thought that this was the end of my love affair, but then the understudy playing Valjean brought the house down with Bring Him Home, Hugo’s yarn put the emotional screws on and the performance got a standing ovation.

Even so, when I went to a screening last month of Tom Hooper’s film version (the first of the musical, there have been over 20 of the novel), my grown-up, cynical self was braced for sentimental tosh. The fact that instead I was thrilled again came as a surprise.

Hooper, it turns out, has made the film the fans will love, the film the part of me that hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be 11 has been waiting for all this time.

He has cast it immaculately, finally giving Hugh Jackman, as Valjean, the tour-de-force singing film role his talents demand (anyone who saw Jackman in the 1998 National Theatre production of Oklahoma! has also been waiting a long time for this movie). He has paid careful respect to the stage show, with the original Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, getting a key cameo and a Gavroche (Daniel Huddlestone) and Éponine (Samantha Barks) fresh from the West End. And crucially he has made everyone sing live, rather than miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack as is the case in virtually every other film musical. The result of this is the Les Misérables ensemble has been able to bring a level of rawness and spontaneous expression to their singing that maximises the film’s emotional clout and appeals to (if not exactly satisfies) the modern taste for realism from our movies at the same time.

I really hope the film does well. Early reviews have been mainly enthusiastic – the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin gave it five stars – and it is up for four Golden Globes, including best picture, which bodes well for the Oscars. Movies of famous musicals have tended to be not only hits but award-winners, too: My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver! and West Side Story all won Best Picture in the Sixties. Chicago won as recently as 2002.

As the prospect of more awards hoves into view (the stage show has won several), it is worth considering where Les Misérables sits in the pantheon of great musicals. It can’t touch Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. And at least a dozen of the Broadway musicals of the Forties have more delightful, and various, tunes.

No, Les Misérables, like the world’s second longest-running musical, The Phantom of the Opera, needs to be judged in the context of the Eighties compositions which, with their sung-through scores and melodramatic stories, aspire to the grandeur of opera. They do not make it there because the music isn’t sophisticated enough. Yet even the aspiration to grandeur is refreshing within a popular culture now dominated by reality TV’s obsession with triviality and childish tasks. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom goes off in the direction of fantastical Grand Guignol myth – one reason why it didn’t work when made into a film in 2004. But Les Misérables, with no room for magic, is ultimately interested in two serious, adult ideas: nobility and redemption. And this does make it a rather exceptional internationally record-breaking singing show.

The actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays the love-struck student Marius in the film, said that at the first screening of Les Misérables in America he thought something had gone wrong with the edit. There was a strange rustling going around the auditorium. And then he realised it was the audience snuffling into their tissues. Perhaps, finally, this is the reason why Les Misérables has survived its 27 years, and why I felt it was so meaningful as a child. It simply makes people cry.